NetChoice, LLC v. Fitch

Mississippi passed House Bill 1126, the “Walker Montgomery Protecting Children Online Act,” a law that will require every person—including every adult—to register and verify their age before they can create social media accounts and access social media websites. Under the Act, all children under the age of 18 must have parental consent to create a social media account. It also forces private websites to take various self-censoring measures to reduce various perceived risks to children online. The law carries civil and criminal penalties. This law robs website users of anonymity, chills the willingness of privacy-conscious users to access legal material at all, and blocks some individuals from accessing online content fully protected by the First Amendment. It also compels speech from private websites. In addition, several terms in the law, including its coverage provision, which exempts various categories of websites (e.g., news, sports) that allow creation of accounts with communication abilities that are “incidental” to the websites’ purpose, are so vague that companies do not have fair warning of whether they are subject to the law’s requirements. All of those violate the First Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment. A federal court in Mississippi recognized that and issued an injunction that blocked the law from going into effect.

On October 3, 2024, FIRE filed an amicus curiae brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, asking it to affirm the injunction and protect the First Amendment rights of Mississippi citizens online.